member of:Observers of the Interdependence of Domestic Objects and Their Influence on Everyday Life

This group has been active for a long time and has already made some remarkable assertions which render life simpler from the practical point of view. For example, I move a pot of green color five centimeters to the right, I push in the thumbtack beside the comb and if Mr. A (another adherent like me) at this moment puts his volume about bee-keeping beside a pattern for cutting out vests, I am sure to meet on the sidewalk of the avenida Madero a woman who intrigues me and whose origin and address I never could have known...--Remedios Varo

(Artwork by Remedios Varo)

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.--Franz Kafka

Sunday, June 30, 2013

“A 24-year-old woman was first seen in 1950, because of seizures. From early childhood she had been unusually fond of music and had always felt a strong desire to express her emotions in dancing. At the age of 16 she was a tall, gaunt girl who felt both inferior and aloof. At this time she would often dance in the living room and her father would tease her about her ‘jitterbug antics.’ Offended, she would withdraw to her room and in solitude play records by the hour. She felt transported by loud ‘swing’ music and discovered that by concentrating intensely she could ‘see visions.’ These usually were of a blond woman and a dark man. They were dressed in various fashions but usually wore evening clothes, as if they were about to attend a formal dance. The couple seemed to be dancing together. The patient mentioned this phenomenon casually to her parents and friends, none of whom believed her. She rather enjoyed the vision and the accompanying trancelike state which she entered after prolonged listening. She continued to induce these episodes for the next 2 years.

In 1945, the patient struck her head in an automobile accident; however, there was no alteration of consciousness or signs of external injury. She was in bed for the next 5 days because of ‘shock.’ Six months later she had a nocturnal generalized convulsion. Shortly thereafter the visual hallucinations began to appear whenever she heard certain music, even though she had not consciously willed them. This inexorable recurrence reduced her to panic at the sound of jazz music...” {Source: Musicogenic Epilepsy: Report of 3 Cases; David D. Daly, MD and Maurice J Barry, Jr., MD; Psychosomatic Medicine, September 1957, 19: 399-408}.

Did her desire, her focus, her need--and the music--bring her in contact with some other reality, in which a woman danced with a partner, instead of alone and subject to ridicule? It is important to notice the difference between a fantasy or daydream and a hallucination, the latter affecting all the senses and being something that our entire being sinks into.

And what happened after the accident? All of a sudden the existence of that other pair no longer depended upon her call...as if they really did exist on their own...

If there really are unlimited streams of reality, where could they all be hiding, other than inside the mind? As we trace the electricity of our brains and bodies and the music of that electricity, can we discover wormholes to other universes, other iterations of our selves?

One Tango dancer grasps the bow and the other the viola, all four characters involved in the same rhythmic event though from different planes of reality; out of darkness, out of light, the electricity brings them together and to life. Who is calling whom? Who is real and who is not?

Thursday, June 27, 2013

The Midnight Clock, a fully functioning clock marking 24 hours and the approximate times of sunrise, midday, sunset, and midnight, holds a riddle that teases you to discover and move various keys, in a particular order and at a particular time of day or night, in order to finally discover a hidden compartment. The clock is made for a treasure of your choosing to be hidden inside, the example given being a book.

The creator, Devin Montgomery, says:

“Fiction is filled with hidden doorways, destinations, and treasures--think of Tolkein’s secret door to Durin, Rawling’s platform 9 3/4, or Lewis’s wardrobe--but we rarely find them in real life. The Midnight Clock changes that.”

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

--Walt Whitman

Santa Caterina Maquette by zoe blue

In his address to the parents of incoming music students to the Boston Conservatory, Karl Paulnack, in an explanation of how musicians are like emergency-workers, reached back millenia in history to begin his argument:

“The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us.”

This is not only a meditation on the impact music can have on mood and emotion, for it is also true that music can grab hold of diseases our science still has little idea how to locate in the body, and hold them down or shut them down, releasing our invisible pieces so we can function again.

“While the power of music has been known for millennia,” Oliver Sacks states in his Musicophilia, “the idea of formal music therapy arose only in the late 1940s, especially in response to the large numbers of soldiers returning from the battlefields of the Second World War with head wounds and traumatic brain injuries or ‘battle fatigue’ (or ‘shell shock,’ as it was called in the First World War, a condition we would now categorize as ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’).With many of these soldiers, it was found that their pain and misery and even, seemingly, some of their physiological responses (pulse rates, blood pressure, and so on) could be improved by music.”

Listening to music can bring the blood pressure back into balance whether it was too high or too low, and it can decrease physical pain, both acute and chronic. Just after WWI, as those traumatized vets were entering the wards, a bizarre ‘sleeping sickness’, encephalitis lethargica, also “swept the globe,” its cause unclear. Those patients were either frozen--catatonic-- or racked by stuttering, explosive, non-functional movements; they would remain that way for decades. When Sacks started working with them in 1966, there was still no medication available to help them, but there was music: what he saw was that the patients

“could not easily initiate anything, and yet often they were able to respond. Many could catch and return a ball if it was thrown, and almost all of them tended to respond in some way to music. Some of them could not initiate a single step but could be drawn into dancing and could dance fluidly. Some could scarcely utter a syllable; their voices, when they could speak, lacked tone, lacked force, were almost spectral. But these patients were able to sing on occasion, loudly and clearly, with full vocal force and a normal range of expressiveness and tone.”

Two different things are revealing themselves in this range of patient: one is that music can return a patient’s mysteriously stolen spark, bringing him or her ‘back to life’; the second is that music can re-calibrate the pulse rates, blood pressure, and other physiological and psychological damages caused by war. What does that mean about those damages? Think about the cacophony of war, the discordance of the exercise itself, yes, but also the jarring, shocking, thundering sounds of it: a piece of music, the symphony of society, is destroying itself. Someone who has been in the midst of that loses his way, his heart stutters, the blood thus doesn’t flow smoothly and the oxygen balances are inadequate at times or overwhelming at others (like what happens when you stand up too fast, multiplied)--these are symptoms that bring to mind hyperventilation--

--and hyperventilation brings me to the studies of Vic Tandy, a professor at Coventry University. Tandy was an engineering designer who, at the time of the events described below, was working in a lab that manufactured medical equipment. His experiences there led to the publication of a paper in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research called The Ghost in the Machine. People working in that lab were beginning to complain of hauntings; odd things were happening, and the stress and anxiety of working there skyrocketed. Tandy himself chalked events up to odd noises made by various pieces of equipment combined with the power of suggestion and ignored the drama to focus on his work. But one night, he stayed late, alone, working on a project:

“As he sat at the desk writing he began to feel increasingly uncomfortable. He was sweating but cold and the feeling of depression was noticeable. The cats were moving around and the groans and creaks from what was now a deserted factory were ‘spooky’, but there was also something else. It was as though something was in the room with V.T. There was no way into the lab without walking past the desk where V.T. was working. He looked around and even checked the gas bottles to be sure there was not a leak in the room. There were oxygen and carbon dioxide bottles and occasionally the staff would work with anaesthetic agents, all of which could cause all sorts of problems if handled inappropriately. All of these checked out fine so V.T. went to get a cup of coffee and returned to the desk. As he was writing he became aware that he was being watched, and a figure slowly emerged to his left. It was indistinct and on the periphery of his vision but it moved as V.T. would expect a person to. The apparition was grey and made no sound...”

Vic Tandy decided to go home for the night, reasoning that his exhaustion was affecting his brain. When he returned the next day, it was early and with his fencing foil, which needed a small adjustment before a competition; he was planning to use the lab’s bench vice to hold it down as he worked. He set everything up and left the room to get some oil:

“As he returned, the free end of the blade was frantically vibrating up and down. Combining this with his experience from the previous night he once again felt an immediate twinge of fright. However, vibrating pieces of metal were more familiar to him than apparitions so he decided to experiment. If the foil blade was being vibrated it was receiving energy which must have been varying in intensity at a rate equal to the resonant frequency of the blade. Energy of the type just described is usually referred to as sound. There was a lot of background noise but there could also be low frequency sound or infrasound which V.T. could not hear.”

Human hearing, like human sight, is limited to a small range of frequencies. At the bottom of the piano keyboard, around where the tuba gets its tones, our ability to pick up sound drops off, and the frequencies enter a range referred to as infrasound--which we can’t hear, but we can still be immensely affected by. Infrasound is responsible for much of the damage caused by the explosion of a bomb, for example, as a sonic wave carries the destruction over a far greater area than the actual blast site (remember our soldiers, above). Scientists are now using infrasound detectors to try to get some warning before earthquakes, and it is believed that the explosion of a volcano is also a deep infrasonic event. It’s infrasound that shatters windows miles away from an explosive event. Vic Tandy, in an interview with Chris Arnot for the Guardian, explains that “evidence from NASA and other sources suggests that it [infrasound] can cause you to hyperventilate and your eyeballs to vibrate;” the resultant vision-smearing and oxygen-depletion then combine to create anxiety and apparitions, all of which can veer into a self-feeding loop that leads to the sensation that some entity is trying to kill you--and in that, the effects of shell-shock and the experience of terrifying ghost-hauntings can become oddly similar. Vic Tandy’s lab had just had an exhaust fan installed which had a frequency of 18.9 Hz (our hearing bottoms out around 20 Hz), and the shape of the room had created a standing wave at that frequency, meaning, basically, that it was bouncing off the wall of one end and returning to the other side in an endless cycle. The center of the standing wave was his desk: the apparitions, the vibrating metal, and the sense of unease and terror were all a creation of the low, inaudible hum of an exhaust fan. Haunting solved.

Imagine the explosions of war, combined with the front-row view of some of the bleakest of human capabilities, and suddenly ‘shell-shock’ becomes understandable as physiological damage in an endless feedback loop. How fascinating, then, that music can be precisely what is needed to heal it--although it’s likely that, for a long-term cure, a different demonstration of human society’s capabilities might also be necessary.

And, in fact, every patient--whether traumatized, parkinsonian, aphasic, or otherwise ‘locked-in’, needs a particular music to return him (or her) back to his own natural rhythm and flow. It’s not a cure in a pill; it’s specific to the patient, and to his desired interaction with his environment.

In several of the cases Sacks studies, the power of symbolism is noted as is the fact that practice in the mind is at least to some extent equal to practice in the body. For some, imagining a piece of music playing is enough to get them going and keep a flowing movement in their mind, speech and body, for as long as they can keep the piece going in their imagination, so the mere mention by a nurse or visitor of a particular Chopin Nocturne could be enough to kick-start (galvanize) the patient. But imagination is even more powerful in that within it, you can call upon many only hoped-for abilities and put them into play, and this is where Santa Caterina as an iconic character, there to remind you to move when you feel frozen, comes in:

“Ivan Vaughan, a Cambridge psychologist who developed Parkinson’s disease, wrote a memoir about living with the disease, and Jonathan Miller directed a 1984 BBC documentary (Ivan, broadcast as part of the Horizon series) based on this. In both the book and the film, Ivan describes a variety of ingenious, indirect stratagems for getting himself going, which he could not do by sheer will. Thus, for example, he would allow his eyes to wander when he woke up, until he caught sight of a tree painted on the wall by his bed. This would act as a stimulus, in effect saying, “Climb me,” and by imagining himself climbing, Ivan could climb out of bed—a simple act which he was unable to do directly.”(Musicophilia).

Investigate Your Dreams

Friends and Artists

“This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970) xv.

"Everything leads me to think that, in the near future, reality will be considered exclusively as a mere state of depression and inactivity of the mind"--Salvador Dali